March 24th, 2009, 1 Comment »
Yesterday Julie wrote about the Skate Bug, a kind of auditory aid for getting from (to borrow Lee and Sachi’s metaphor again) A to G:
At the Four Continents Championship in Vancouver last month I saw the ‘Skate Bug’ for the first time. It’s a radio device that connects listeners with live event commentary. One part fits in your ear; the other part is hand held. With the Skate Bug, listeners can get real-time event commentary–even more detailed than those watching the event on TV at home–and can even ask questions about elements or scoring via text message during the event. The device is meant to make figure skating more understandable and fan friendly, according to this article in the Vancouver Sun.
It’s kind of like a real-time tutorial in your ear. I remember watching figure skating on the BBC during the 2002 Olympics. The eloquent commentators did an astonishingly good job of articulating the nuances of the sport and the judging system. This was critical, as the Beeb’s audience probably only sees figure skating once every four years. I often feel that this is an explanation failure of North American coverage of the sport–the hosts assume that their audience know more than they do.
Apparently Skate Canada is offering this device directly, as a means of recruiting new fans to the sport. In their press release, they say they’re introducing “a new multimedia tool at Skate Canada events”. That’s a misnomer, isn’t it? I mean, it only offers the one media.
The next step would be to offer the feed in stream audio, so that neophyte fans at home could tune in. And it’s easy to imagine that these could be offered for other sports, too. The first time I go to a cricket game, for example, I could seriously benefit from one of these.
1 Comment »
August 24th, 2008, 6 Comments »
We don’t have a TV, so I’ve hardly watched any Olympics. I’m surprised to say that I missed watching them a little. I’ve caught the highlights on the CBC’s website (live streaming still very dodgy on my MacBook), but that’s been it.
So, I have a lousy sense of Canada’s achievements at these games. They’ve won 19 medals, which sounds good, but how about a little context? How does 19 medals today compare to winning 19 medals in, say, 1968? How have the Olympics changed in the past 40 years?
I did some research on Wikipedia, and assembled this spreadsheet. In doing so, I learned some interesting stuff:
- At the 2008 Olympics, Canada ended up ranking 19th in the medal standings. That’s its best performance since 1992, and (ignoring the heavily-boycotted 1984 Games) its second best performance in the last 40 years. The Canadian Olympic Committee had set a goal of a top-16 finish, which seems pretty unrealistic given history and the competition.
- We can also look at the portion of the total medal pot that Canada won. They won 1.98% of these year’s medals.
- I looked at some other factors, like how many medals Canada won per event or attending athlete, but I’m not sure that they’re germane.
I also discovered a couple of general Olympic stats:
- Since 1968, the number of athletes attending the Games has doubled.
- Since 1968, the number of events has increased by 76%, and the total number of events by 82%. I guess we can attribute the greater increase in athletes to new team sports or larger pools of qualifying athletes?
I know, I’m a big nerd. But I think we can celebrate Canada’s medal haul as a very good result. They’ve done better, but 2008 counts as above average.
To those who would accuse me of focusing too much on the medal count, I’d point you to this Globe and Mail article. In it, two-time gold medal winner and executive director of the Road to Excellence Alex Baumann talks about how much their emphasis is on winning, and funding those sports where Canadian athletes are likely to medal.
6 Comments »
August 11th, 2008, 5 Comments »
I was watching some Olympics coverage yesterday, and started thinking about rituals of celebration:
- In indoor volleyball, the team converges after every successful point. There’s a momentary huddle where, I assume, encouraging and congratulatory remarks are exchanged.
- In gymnastics, the girls (for, yes, they’re mostly still girls) of the American team gave each other the most cursory of hugs after each routine.
- Basketball seems to reflect what occurs in the NBA. There’s very little reaction after the average basket, and just some macho posturing after a particularly righteous slam dunk.
- I didn’t see what happened in water polo, but I think it’s much like basketball.
In games where teams accrue points, there’s a correlation between the frequency of scoring and the amount of celebration. In hockey and football (that is, soccer), the entire team congregates around the scorer to congratulate them. At the other end of the scale, there’s very little reaction from teammates in basketball or doubles tennis.
Is there a threshold where the group-to-congratulate stops? Maybe it’s not that simple. There’s potentially 25 points in a volleyball game, though there’s easily 75 to 100 in a match. That’s actually more ’scores’ that the average basketball game, so I guess there’s no hard and fast rule.
Can you think of other high-scoring sports where the team celebrates after every point?
5 Comments »
April 24th, 2008, 4 Comments »
Boris just twittered about a pick-up ultimate game next week:
CRAB Park
101 E Waterfront Road
Vancouver, British Columbia
It’s time to dust off the arteries and get the short shorts out of the closet. I don’t care if the weather gods still think it’s winter, I need to run around outside!
Come out and play some pick up Ultimate, everything from short scrimmages to some skills practice. Lots of discs available, everyone welcome.
Happily, I can make it to this, as I’m giving a talk in Vancouver the next morning. Unless, of course, it rains. And I’ll need the practice–I just joined the Victoria Ultimate League.
I’m sure that newbies are welcome. If you’ve never played ultimate, give it a try–it’s my favourite recreational sport.
4 Comments »
April 9th, 2008, 2 Comments »
I’m currently watching the live stream for the NHL playoffs from CBC Sports. The quality isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing.
I had some difficulty getting a reliable stream in Windows Media Player. It worked fine on my MacBook using Flip4Mac, and it worked okay using VLC on my Windows machine. Yet, Microsoft’s media player was showing me five seconds of live video, and then freezing (the dreaded ‘buffering’) for 5 to 30 seconds. Five more seconds of live footage, and repeat.
I checked my connection speed, which was a robust 14 MB/second. Combine that with the reliable feeds on other apps and PCs, and the problem was certainly (and predictably) Windows Media Player.
I eventually solved the problem. Here’s how:
- Start up Windows Media Player.
- On the Tools menu, click Options.
- On the Performance tab, under Network buffering (yes, I’m troubled by the lack of title case), choose the second option. In the box beside Buffer, enter ‘30′. See the screenshot below. This ensures that Windows Media Player will always queue up 30 seconds of video, ensuring that you don’t get jittery or frozen video.
- Click OK, and you should be good to go.
2 Comments »
November 30th, 2007, 12 Comments »
Or is that correct as is? I don’t think so, but in any case it takes the English language around the back of the bike sheds and kicks its ass, doesn’t it?
12 Comments »
October 24th, 2007, 4 Comments »
James and I were walking down the lane outside our farmhouse on Gozo, and I happened to glance at a bag of garbage awaiting pickup. Look a little closer–what’s that inside?
Outside of Toronto, everybody hates the Leafs.
4 Comments »
September 19th, 2007, 15 Comments »
Tomorrow I’d like to watch a crucial Canada-Australia football/soccer game at the Women’s World Cup. It’s being broadcast live (at the convenient local time of 10:45am–the tournament’s in China) on CBCSports.ca, but can only be accessed in Canada. The same is true of NHL hockey, which I’d like to watch this fall.
The CBC blocks the rest of the world from watching sports programs because they don’t have broadcast licensing agreements with other countries. That’s lame, but understandable. It’s frustrating, though, as a tax-paying Canadian who doesn’t happen to currently reside in Canada.
I’m looking for a relatively pain-free means of looking Canadian to the CBC’s Canucklehead firewall. I read through Boing Boing’s anti-censorware page, but nothing there seemed applicable to my particular problem. Any suggestions?
UPDATE: I’ve got a kind offer from a Canada-residing Canadian to offer his machine as a proxy server. Now I’m desperate seeking instructions and/or software which enables him to easily set up a proxy server thingy, and me to connect through his machine.
UPDATE #2: Meh. I got access to a Slingbox from another kind Canadian, but the connection speed was pretty poor on my end. Plus, sports are about the worst thing you can watch on dodgy Internet-powered streaming Web video. There’s fast camera movements and many small objects in motion on screen. Soccer is bad, but in my experience hockey is the worst.
Ultimately, the Canadian women failed to advance through to the quarter-finals. A disappointing result for our national team.
15 Comments »
September 14th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Caterina wrote a nice little essay about her failed soccer career, and ended with this charming anecdote:
They don’t let little kids compete these days, because it might ruin their self esteem. I see it all the time. A friend of mine at work said her 8 year old son played soccer, and one day he came home from playing and she asked him how many goals he’d scored. “There are no goals,” he said.
I don’t have much exposure to children’s sports. Parents, is this anti-competition streak common these days?
8 Comments »
July 27th, 2007, 11 Comments »
Discuss.
I think the comparison is fairly apt. Here’s why:
- I’m guessing the audience for celebrity gossip is 80% female, and the audience for sports news is 80% male.
- Both topics are pretty trivial, yet they have vast amounts of media attention.
- Both topics fetishize the tiniest details of their subjects: “Paris Hilton goes for coffee!” “Derek Jeter has a hangnail!”
- They both seem to feature the noble and the ignoble. Lindsay Lohan gets drunk and runs into things, yet Angelina Jolie is adopting most of sub-Saharan Africa. Michael Vick is running dog fighting rings in his basement, yet, I don’t know, Steve Montador is in Africa for Right to Play.
- Both topics feature individuals who make absurd amounts of money.
That’s why David and Victoria Beckham are so enormously famous–they’re a perfect storm of celebrity and sports (and, I should add, encouragement to middle-school dropouts everywhere). I wish it helped that one of them was actually good at something, but, as we know, talent isn’t a prerequisite for fame.
What do you think?
11 Comments »
